Quality Center (now known as Application Lifecycle Management, and referred to herein as “QC/ALM”) is a popular web-based software testing management platform from HEWLETT-PACKARD that helps manage information about application releases, testing cycles, requirements, test automation, and software defects from a central repository (a “primary database” herein). In particular, QC/ALM provides software testing functionality, including large scale batch testing, so that quality assurance (QA) engineers can define a number of test cases, and then have those tests run in an automated fashion. The QA engineers, or other users, can then login to QC/QLM to obtain status updates and detailed reporting of test results.
Job Control Language (JCL) is a scripting language used to define tests for mainframe computing systems. Quality Center does not natively support JCL tests, or any other tests for mainframe computing systems. This has caused QA engineers who handle such tests to utilize a manual testing process that does not utilize QC, in which a QA engineer manually submits his JCL tests to a mainframe computing system, waits until the jobs are processed, and then manually summarizes the results of those tests in a tabular or graphical form for QA management.